songwriting

I am always fascinated when a teenage musician – not just a singer or player, but a songwriter – becomes a global star.

It’s a selfish fascination. I remember being that age and being full to the brim with inspiration. I recall feeling like songs were bursting out of my brain every single day, sometimes faster than I could write them down. I would naively follow all of my melodic impulses, no matter how transgressive, and for as many awful choices I see in hindsight there are the occasional flashes of brilliance.

I can never decide whether it is good or bad that YouTube didn’t exist at the time. I love that the teenaged songwriter version of me is a Schrödinger’s cat of internet fame; we’ll never know if he would be beloved or ridiculed.

For those selfish reasons, I have been more fascinated but the journey of the precociously talented Lorde than I was with the slick Justin Bieber or the initially folksy Taylor Swift.

All three are mega-talented songwriters, but they both express that in different ways. Bieber’s expression was about the casual, effortless coolness of being in the in-club. Taylor Swift was about transformation – from country kid who sang about being an underdog to pop bombshell sweeping up Grammys.

Lorde’s expression has been the utter opposite of them both. She’s almost too full of effort compared to Bieber, and as self-conscious as Swift but more wild and free than she has ever allowed herself to be.

Lorde’s songs are brimming with that wildness, starting with “Royals” – a song so basic yet so vividly evocative. Each feels like an aperture into her wildly buzzing creative mind, controlling the flow, letting just enough of her interior world through that we can make sense of it.

Despite the electricity of her songs, Lorde’s Pure Heroine wasn’t the world-altering smash of, say, Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill. It’s not a singular, unassailable achievement. She could and would be able to follow it up, and just has with her sophomore effort, Melodrama.

There are a lot of interesting, mature moments on Melodrama, but none so arresting as the bare piano balled “Liability.” Maybe that’s because Lorde is an obvious mastermind, controlling every little flutter and breath noise across her discography, but “Liability” is her sparest song. It’s a bare piano ballad – just keys and her voice.

This post makes me absolutely giddy with joy: I’m debuting a song by my favorite band in Philly, who I also interviewed for this post, and if you buy it all the proceeds go straight to Women’s Law Project.

If You Harden On The Inside by Hezekiah JonesHezekiah Jones is the folk collective formed by and around Philly-based songwriter Raphael Cutrufello. He pulls a peculiar double-duty while fronting the band, acting the entire time as Hezekiah, with each one of the band’s rotating cast of musicians presenting themselves as another fictional member of the Jones clan.

(My favorite: Dow Jones.)

That little touch of mythology goes a long way to contextualizing Cutrufello’s songwriting. When you hear Hezekiah Jones’ music, you have the profound sense that a weird band of back-country geniuses have briefly descended from their cloistered home on a hill to play for you, like a roving band of thespians in Shakespeare.

(It may be a hill in an alternate timeline.)

The songs are full of piercing observations on the human condition, always tinged with optimism. There’s also a smattering of details that place them in a vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape full of endless roiling wars and the Mississippi river expanded out to a sea.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

“If You Harden On The Inside” could easily be a handclaps-and-harmony 60s pop song if it was dressed up with a full band arrangement. Instead, a whimsical chorus of Hezekiahs sings “blah blah blah” as backing to the track, later joined by a swell of electric pianos. As the song whirrs to life with its halting rhythm it gives serious vibes of Dirty Projectors.

Cutrufello AKA Jones plays everything on this track save for drums by Daniel Bower (AKA Roy G. Biv Jones) and bass by Philip D’Agostino (AKA Pepe Jones), a Philly music scene legend and touring member of Get The Led Out.

Half your saints
Are playing video games
Or they’re out doing meth
Or too depressed to get out of bed

All these bodies
What a delicate make
If you harden on the inside
You’ll be easy to break

If someone
Gave into love
Their guard would be down
We could steal all their stuff

My mother loved Michael from his Motown days, and his Off The Wall hit when she was working in a hip Philly dance club, where I’m sure it was unavoidable. She passed that love to me via many, many spins of Thriller and its videos, which I obsessed over for years after its release.

I’ve always assumed that my love for MJ was a habit I learned from my mother, but having watched EV obsess over him for over a year now with no special coaching on my part I’m beginning to think it’s a genetic predisposition. Either that, or his voice was truly so magical that it can enrapture any child’s imagination, no matter when they first hear it.

Maybe both.

For the second year in a row, I tried to teach EV the “Thriller” dance for Halloween. Last year it was more that I was trying to finally learn it and EV liked to shuffle around like a zombie. This year we both tried, but the appeal of a glowing rectangle held too much sway and EV spent more time watching the dance instructors than doing the dance. She only got as far as the head nods.

Now that I’m older and a musician, I can’t help but dissect “Thriller” in a different way.

There’s no possible way to overstate just how truly and deeply weird it was as a song on a Michael Jackson album, let alone as the title track. There’s really not anything else remotely campy on the LP, aside from perhaps “Beat It.”

In fact, the song started out its life not as “Thriller,” but as a Rod Temperton demo called “Starlight.” You can even listen to a completed version of the track with virtually the same production. Free of the creepy lyrics and the Vincent Price cameo, there’s nothing remotely ooky about the song. It sounds like more of the same disco/funk blend from Off the Wall. It’s a near neighbor to “Turn This Disco Out.” [Read more…] about Music Monday: “Thriller” – Michael Jackson

I don’t think that I ever did. In fact, I had not consciously formed much of an opinion of it at all given my scant signposts of Patsy Cline, Garth Brooks, and Shania Twain.

However, a thing I’ve learned about being an adult is that sometimes the unconscious – both your own and the collective – decides something on your behalf, and that determination lingers in your mind in the place of an actual decision until you realize you’ve started making other decisions based on it.

Case and point: Country music. I don’t hate it. Yet, from absorbing a “my truck” here and a “my woman” there from songs playing in the background of life, I was passively assuming I hated country music. People at Smash Fantastic shows would request country songs from time to time and I would selectively ignore them. When Ashley gently suggested that it was finally time for us to learn a few country songs for the band, my reflexive response was, “UGH, NOT COUNTRY MUSIC.”

Despite that, I love to please a crowd, so I looked up a few of the artists that had been shouted in our direction. One was Eric Church. I fired up iTunes and YouTube to see what his most popular song was and they came back with a resounding answer of “Springsteen,” from Church’s third album, Chief.

Fast forward six months and “Springsteen” is AKA my favorite cover song to sing and my toddler’s bedtime song and generally just a fucking masterclass in songwriting.

(Advance to :24 to get to the beginning of the song.)

To get to that realization I had to stop hearing the twang in Church’s voice, because it was activating that unconscious bias of “UGH, NOT COUNTRY MUSIC.” Honestly, it’s a tiresome affectation on any singer, especially when it’s obscuring wonderful pop songs or gatekeeping them from the wider consciousness. You just have to hear past it to get to the performance and the lyrics. Singing it yourself aids in that, if you are able.

Somewhere between that setting sun, “I’m On Fire” and “Born to Run”
You looked at me and I was done. We were just getting started.

Beneath the twang and beyond the minimal band arrangement is the wonderful device of singing about how to find a person who doesn’t exist anymore. Not his long lost high school lover – she’s still walking around in the same town, skirting the edges of his life.

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